Mega-corporation Satirizes Self

Do me a favor; it will take less than two minutes. Watch this Coke commercial from the late '70s:



Have you seen it before? Compare this commercial, which is currently on the air:



I saw this a week or so ago, and initially I was intrigued by the clever re-do of the iconic "Mean Joe" Green commercial from my childhood. But the intrusion of the Coke "brand managers" was kind of odd, and I'm not sure what to do with it.

The commercial shifts, at this point, from a cute homage to the 1970s commercial to a satire of Coke's own status as a corporate hegemon, one that will aggressively sue (or otherwise attack) anyone who infringes on its territory.

My question...Can an entity effectively satirize itself? ("Satire" meaning something different, and deeper, than simply being able to laugh at oneself.) This commercial seems like it ought to work only if it were made by a separate entity (maybe RC Cola) that really does want to poke a whole in Coke's image of cola dominance.

Instead, one of Coke's divisions--Coke Zero--is pretending to be such a disadvantaged entity, engaged in mock-defiance of the Coca Cola Corporation's corporate dominance. This makes sense only if we image a viewer who didn't really know that Coke Zero is actually part of the Coke company. (For example, Coca-Cola once marketed a new brand, Okay Cola, that was supposed to seem a little alternative, and its marketing campaign underplayed the fact that Okay was a Coke brand.)

But, of course, every viewer does know that Coke Zero is just pretending. So what is the basis of the satire? Obviously, the Coke Zero guys who made the commercial don't really believe that Coke's corporate dominance is problematic; they're part of the same team. But I don't think effective satire can occur unless the satirist is sincere--OR unless the audience is persuaded that it's sincere. (Satire purposely exaggerates, of course, but the place it's coming from is sincere, and sincerely perturbed by the problem it exaggerates. Otherwise, it's ineffective.)

So: if this commercial works, it does so despite the fact that its makers are patently insincere in their satiric efforts; the audience, nonetheless, must have decided (for some reason) to go along with the pretense, to suspend disbelief, to pretend to be persuaded (against its own common-sense knowledge) that Coke Zero is engaged in some sort of guerrila marketing campaign that is taking aim at Coke.

I can imagine why the makers of the commercial would want to sell that message: they get the best of both worlds, a funny piece of satire (leading to unconscious associations between Coke Zero and a kind of cool anti-corporate-authority spirit) and an underlying message (which also sertves Coke's ends) that Coke is dominant and inescapable. My question is, why would anyone buy it?